1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to professional and social information and, more specifically, to aggregation, organization and provision of professional and social information.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Data pertaining to the lives of people may be educational, professional, or based on other interests, associations or endeavors, and generally revolves around a particular person or group of people, with a particular emphasis on relationships between people.
Professional information is information pertaining to academics, career and commercial endeavors. Social information is information pertaining to interpersonal relationships, hobbies, interests and non-commercial endeavors in general. Traditionally, information pertaining to people is thought of as either professional or social, with little to no overlap or in-between.
Recently, attention has been focused on social network services. A social network service is a website where users are invited to share information about themselves and establish connections with other users, who may then obtain access to the shared information. These established connections between users form an interlinking network of profiles that has been referred to as the “social graph.”
Social network services have undergone extensive proliferation in recent years and today there are a wide variety of social network services. Examples of popular social network services include Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Google Buzz.
In addition to dedicated social network services, a variety of other websites incorporate aspects of social networking to a niche topic. Examples of such socially aware sites include picture sharing sites Flickr and Razorfish, technology interest sharing sites such as GDGT.COM, and news and story sharing sites such as DIGG.COM. Moreover, content creation platforms such as internet-based discussion forums, groups, chat platforms, and blogs frequently invite users to create public profiles that they may populate with various professional and social information. Moreover, the actual user-created content itself may be thought of as information pertaining to a person.
A variety of other sources exist for professional and social information. These sources may be both online and offline. Examples of other professional and social information sources include public records such as property transfer records and proprietary databases such as credit bureaus. Still other sources of information are tangentially linked or otherwise cross-referenced to particular individuals; examples include intellectual and scientific content sites such as FreePatentsOnline.com, DBLP publications server, ACM author search results, etc.
Ironically, these social network service sites, that have been developed in order to efficiently organize a wide variety of information, have become so numerous and so large that information retrieval across such sources may be disorganized and overwhelming. In response to this disorder, various websites have emerged to organize various sources of social network service information. Examples include FriendFeed.com, Posterous.com, and Google Profile. FriendFeed, for example, allows users to cross-reference their various social network service profiles. Google Profile allows users to cross-reference social network services, FriendFeed profiles, blogs, Twitter account, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, and more. However, these social information consolidation and aggregation services rely on the user to manually link their various profiles and accounts. Moreover, social information is not integrated across linked accounts.
As users who contribute to these social network services generally wish to make their information broadly available and searchable, it is self-defeating that the large number of available social network services may actually contribute to difficulty in finding desired information. Confusion may result from the fact that a great number of people may share similar or identical names and a given person may have numerous different user profiles across many different platforms and as such it may be nearly impossible to determine which profiles belong to a particular person for whom a user seeks to search for relevant information. Some help may be offered where a person has decided to manually link their various profiles and accounts using one of the available services, however, most often people do not know about or bother to take advantages of these aggregation services, and even those who do may neglect to update this information as needed. Moreover, the fact that there are many available aggregation services means that a searcher must systematically try each service in attempting to obtain access to the desired social information.